'The Government should be the champion of the Internet, not a threat' - Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Obama Wednesday night to complain about Internet surveillance programs and the damage it created for "all of our future," an article in Mercury News reports.

The call to the U.S. president is the recent sign of the growing alarm in the tech industry over spy efforts by the government, which came from a news report that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) created a program which can install a software to spy as a pretending Facebook network server when the surveillance target attempts to login to the social network.

In a statement issued Thursday, the NSA denied the impersonation. Zuckerberg expressed on his Facebook account about his confusion and frustration regarding the latest surveillance revelations. "The U.S. government should be the champion of the Internet, not a threat," his post said. He added that the government should be more transparent about what they do, lest people will believe the worst.

(Photo: Wikipedia Commons)Facebook.

The phone call to Obama was the first time Zuckerberg publicly expressed frustration over the Internet surveillance. He met the president previously on friendlier terms, but did not attend a session in the White House weeks ago when other executives in the tech industry voiced complaints about NASA.

Last fall, Zuckerberg said in a tech industry conference that the government "blew it" by not expecting the economic fallout of revelations about authorities spying on internet users all over the world. Zuckerberg wrote to Facebook users on Thursday, "while engineers work hard to improve security, it is to protect against criminals, not against the government."

The White House confirms to Reuters Zuckerberg's phone call to the U.S. president.